Can't make this stuff up

[cosmolinguist]

I hadn't thought of this before, but this is a good time of year for cartoon watchers. It's time for Christmas letters. They're already starting to trickle in at my house, though I think none of the truly atrocious letters have showed up yet (my mom has a cousin in Edina, a suburb that would be posh if we had posh in the US; their letter is legendary), though there is the nice picture of my mom's sister and her family, posed in their living room in T-shirts, grinning at the prospect of having a camera with a timer—which they know how to use!—thus making this picture possible. I was disappointed that the T-shirts didn't match this year like they did last year; that's much funnier.

Pure, unadulterated cartoons.

I found myself wondering how I would react if, for example, someone I had known slightly at school, or who lived a few houses down the street until 1992, or whom my wife had once met at a conference, were to phone up and say something like, "Just to let you know that we had a holiday in the Seychelles this year. Though we had booked a non-smoking room, we didn't get one. Our daughter managed five As and four starred As in her GCSEs, though we were a bit disappointed by the B in physics. Oh, and we've bought a brand new Volvo, and we thought you might like to know that the binmen didn't come at all the second Thursday in March ..." You'd think they were stark, staring mad, suffering from a form of solipsism that had become a dangerous medical condition. Yet people appear to feel there is nothing wrong with doing exactly that in written form....

Some of us - and I'm not the only one tilling this particular field - are dependent on a constant supply of unprimped letters, letters that devote 300 words to the tale of a light bulb that needed changing, 500 words to the astonishing success of the offspring, and 800 to a uniquely painful operation. We need letters describing disastrous holidays, such as the couple who visit Holland to see the bulb fields. The hotel is filthy and in the red light district, with prostitutes, junkies and drug dealers thronging the street outside. "So on to the bulb fields, which turned out to be acres of bare earth, since they'd lopped all the heads off the week before our arrival."...

There is the fellow who provides a minute-by-minute account of his day, beginning with, "Rise at 7.12 to the sound of Radio 3, down to the kitchen to make the tea, kettle having boiled on a time switch. Put in milk until the reflection of the light in the cups is covered. Take it up to the bedroom, pour two cups. Turn on TV and watch breakfast until football comes on. Janet gets up and gets dressed . . ." He continues with a namecheck for the brand of electric razor he uses, his health breakfast ("half a banana and eight grapes") and on to Sainsbury's for the high spot of the day, shopping! Followed by "a cup of coffee and a bun, or biscuit". This man's wife must be crawling up the wall, because she comments, "I think we are stuck in a rut." He replies, "Well, it's a lovely rut!" Of course, she may have shot him before this year's letter got written.

Comments

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

Ah, you have discovered the wonders of Simon Hoggart's column :)
BTW if I ever played you The News Quiz on Radio 4 while you were over here, that's the bloke who introduces it (or does now - even though he's been doing it nearly ten years I still get confused when I hear the introduction and don't hear 'and here's your chairman, Barry Took'...), so now you know what voice to hear it in...

[cosmolinguist]

You did actually play that for me, and I remember him because you mentioned at the time that you still expect to be the other guy. :-)